You see a post on your dash asking if you know the sound effect within. You hit play on the audio file. You hear, very clearly, your own father, telling you how proud he is of you, unconditionally. You vote "I've never heard this before". You scroll on
Minor quibble about this book: Viewpoint characters called Dann, Dayne, and Dahlen. Viewpoint characters called Calen and Coren.
It's not a huge problem, I don't find myself getting confused, but it stands out as someone who is pernickety about giving my characters different sounds for their names unless a similar sound is meant to denote a connection.
It's annoying that for all this book's many flaws, and there are so many, including the irritatingly cookie-cutter romance subplots, there are actually things it does really well.
Rist's storyline -- despite it being the source of the worst 'real world philosophers with their names barely changed' moment so far -- is superb, and actually has been consistently over all four books so far. Having him work for the evil empire and sort of knowing they're pretty bad, but staying because of both genuine bonds he's built with good people there and a constant stream of manipulation tactics is actually pretty neat. Usually when you've got someone working for an evil empire in a book, they have no idea it's evil and then they immediately defect when they find out -- here, he's uncomfortable with all the blood magic, notices the obvious censorship in all the books, realises that his mentor has done terrible things in the past and challenges him on it, but it still makes total sense that he's staying. By the time he has the opportunity to leave, he's built up relationships with his fellow mages, and his various mentors (who are bad people, but not two-dimensional evil archetypes), and any cracks are filled in by manipulation.
It's also got the strongest character writing of any storyline. Garramon, his mentor, is absolutely a villain, but he clearly has genuine affection for and loyalty to the mages under his care. A lot of the other imperial higher-ups are exhausted immortals who hate what they're doing but have sunk-cost-fallacied themselves into never stopping. Neela is the only love interest in this book who actually feels like she has character flaws, and her own life with her own goals, and a dynamic with Rist beyond sassiness and pep talking. Rist himself is a really solid portrayal of an autistic character, not least because him being autistic isn't the sum total of his personality and isn't written in a condescending or infantilising way.
It's good stuff, and tbh should've been the main storyline.
And there's other plot threads that are good too: Dann is actually fairly engaging to read and has a character arc. He is -- extremely Mat-from-Wheel-of-Time, both in his personality and arc, but there's nothing wrong with writing a character that takes cues from a character in another thing. The humour in his storyline doesn't always land, but it lands sometimes and frankly that's more than can be said for a lot of books.
Dann's storyline has fairly ... mixed ... character writing, there are some characters who are really well written (Vaeril, Tessara) and some who just aren't (Erik).
Ella's storyline is pretty decent too, with Ella being a pretty well-written character even if she is just covering all the basic story beats of 'person discovers they have a mysterious and dangerous magic' storyline, in order, exactly how you'd expect.
And for a book with a lot of different storylines (nine, at last count, which is too many -- look, everyone wants to be GRRM with eight or nine ongoing storylines, but most people can't be GRRM. I can't be GRRM. If the massive delays with The Winds of Winter have shown us anything, it's that GRRM can't necessarily be GRRM), it does a decent job at linking together the different storylines and having them intersect and weave in and out of each other. That's definitely not nothing, it's something a lot of authors struggle to do even with far fewer storylines.
There is good stuff here, but it's drowned in just an absolute sea of guff. Trim the storyline down to Rist in the empire, Dann and Calen in the rebellion, and Ella doing her own thing, and you'd have a really strong set of books.
The fourth book in a fantasy series that I ... I'm actually not sure if I enjoy it, but I read three entire doorstopper books of it, so something about it must appeal to me. Anyway, the fourth is out, and as one of my many problems with it, there are several romance subplots and my god, bar one they are all the exact same two characters with the exact same romantic dynamic.
There are four, and three of them are:
-- Man who is a viewpoint character, who is a morally upright, somewhat stoic warrior, recently burdened with the heavy responsibility of leading other warriors and being slowly crushed by it.
-- Woman who is a quote-unquote 'sassy' warrior under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also constantly be the Supportive Presence who tells him how great he is.
-- All their interactions are either him being like "Wow ... you're so beautiful ..." and her being like "[Sassy remark about his good taste and/or that he needs to focus]," or him being like "The responsibilities ... so many people's lives on my shoulders ..." and her being like "[Pep talk monologue about how he's a charismatic leader whose men are absolutely loyal to him]."
One of them is:
-- Man who is a viewpoint character who is a morally upright but antiheroic-by-way-of-naivete mage who isn't responsible for leading people and is also a halfway decent portrayal of an autistic character.
-- Woman who is a quote-unquote 'sassy' mage who isn't under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also be supportive in a vaguely tsundere-ish way.
-- They do actually have a decent variety of different kinds of scenes together, in fairness.
Part of this is that the author just doesn't know how to write that many characters of either gender, there's basically four types of men and three types of women, which becomes very noticeable in a book with tons of characters. Honestly, the storyline about Mage Guy Who's Getting Bamboozled Into Working For The Evil Empire should have been the main or maybe only storyline, because it's the only one with a viewpoint character who's especially interesting, it has a fairly decent supporting cast, and the romance subplot there is easily the most tolerable.
It also has the lowest amount of Speeches About How Great The Viewpoint Character is, and the speeches that do happen are rendered a lot more tolerable because they're coming from various forms of Evil Imperials who are making said speeches to manipulate him.
I should note that immediately after posting this I clicked to the next page and one of the female love interests above started giving one of the male viewpoint characters above a pep talk about how he's a great leader who inspires loyalty, so needless to say I'm feeling very vindicated right now.
A fifth romance subplot has been added to the pile.
Good news: The male viewpoint character involved in this one is not a stoic warrior recently burdened with the heavy responsibility of leading other warriors, and the woman in the romance isn't giving any peptalks.
Bad news: Y E T
Unrelated issue with the book I'm reading, and one that's only popped up in this book, not in the previous three: Trying to work in fantasy versions of real world philosophers.
Like it is ridiculous how much it slammed me out of the story as I read someone in this fantasy world rattle off the famous quote often attributed to Edmund Burke but whose earliest attribution is from John Stuart Mill, and then explain the real-life misattribution with the names barely changed.
And this isn't even the only time it's happened in this book. Earlier characters were discussing The Art of War by 'Sumara Tuzan' and it was almost as jarring.
Because this clearly isn't the characters talking, this is the author reaching through the page to explain to me the cool fact he learned about how Edmund Burke actually isn't the originator of the quote.
The fourth book in a fantasy series that I ... I'm actually not sure if I enjoy it, but I read three entire doorstopper books of it, so something about it must appeal to me. Anyway, the fourth is out, and as one of my many problems with it, there are several romance subplots and my god, bar one they are all the exact same two characters with the exact same romantic dynamic.
There are four, and three of them are:
-- Man who is a viewpoint character, who is a morally upright, somewhat stoic warrior, recently burdened with the heavy responsibility of leading other warriors and being slowly crushed by it.
-- Woman who is a quote-unquote 'sassy' warrior under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also constantly be the Supportive Presence who tells him how great he is.
-- All their interactions are either him being like "Wow ... you're so beautiful ..." and her being like "[Sassy remark about his good taste and/or that he needs to focus]," or him being like "The responsibilities ... so many people's lives on my shoulders ..." and her being like "[Pep talk monologue about how he's a charismatic leader whose men are absolutely loyal to him]."
One of them is:
-- Man who is a viewpoint character who is a morally upright but antiheroic-by-way-of-naivete mage who isn't responsible for leading people and is also a halfway decent portrayal of an autistic character.
-- Woman who is a quote-unquote 'sassy' mage who isn't under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also be supportive in a vaguely tsundere-ish way.
-- They do actually have a decent variety of different kinds of scenes together, in fairness.
Part of this is that the author just doesn't know how to write that many characters of either gender, there's basically four types of men and three types of women, which becomes very noticeable in a book with tons of characters. Honestly, the storyline about Mage Guy Who's Getting Bamboozled Into Working For The Evil Empire should have been the main or maybe only storyline, because it's the only one with a viewpoint character who's especially interesting, it has a fairly decent supporting cast, and the romance subplot there is easily the most tolerable.
It also has the lowest amount of Speeches About How Great The Viewpoint Character is, and the speeches that do happen are rendered a lot more tolerable because they're coming from various forms of Evil Imperials who are making said speeches to manipulate him.
I should note that immediately after posting this I clicked to the next page and one of the female love interests above started giving one of the male viewpoint characters above a pep talk about how he's a great leader who inspires loyalty, so needless to say I'm feeling very vindicated right now.
The fourth book in a fantasy series that I ... I'm actually not sure if I enjoy it, but I read three entire doorstopper books of it, so something about it must appeal to me. Anyway, the fourth is out, and as one of my many problems with it, there are several romance subplots and my god, bar one they are all the exact same two characters with the exact same romantic dynamic.
There are four, and three of them are:
-- Man who is a viewpoint character, who is a morally upright, somewhat stoic warrior, recently burdened with the heavy responsibility of leading other warriors and being slowly crushed by it.
-- Woman who is a quote-unquote 'sassy' warrior under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also constantly be the Supportive Presence who tells him how great he is.
-- All their interactions are either him being like "Wow ... you're so beautiful ..." and her being like "[Sassy remark about his good taste and/or that he needs to focus]," or him being like "The responsibilities ... so many people's lives on my shoulders ..." and her being like "[Pep talk monologue about how he's a charismatic leader whose men are absolutely loyal to him]."
One of them is:
-- Man who is a viewpoint character who is a morally upright but antiheroic-by-way-of-naivete mage who isn't responsible for leading people and is also a halfway decent portrayal of an autistic character.
-- Woman who is a quote-unquote 'sassy' mage who isn't under his command, who will playfully rib him about his flaws without ever going into detail about them but also be supportive in a vaguely tsundere-ish way.
-- They do actually have a decent variety of different kinds of scenes together, in fairness.
Part of this is that the author just doesn't know how to write that many characters of either gender, there's basically four types of men and three types of women, which becomes very noticeable in a book with tons of characters. Honestly, the storyline about Mage Guy Who's Getting Bamboozled Into Working For The Evil Empire should have been the main or maybe only storyline, because it's the only one with a viewpoint character who's especially interesting, it has a fairly decent supporting cast, and the romance subplot there is easily the most tolerable.
It also has the lowest amount of Speeches About How Great The Viewpoint Character is, and the speeches that do happen are rendered a lot more tolerable because they're coming from various forms of Evil Imperials who are making said speeches to manipulate him.
literally every music genre has at least one album that will absolutely change your life if you give it a shot
I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF
This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.
Reblogging because it’s a damn potato and I want to encourage people to assume potatoes are magical.
For all the American electorate's manifold faults, both analytical and moral, they really don't actually seem to care that much about transphobic scaremongering one way or the other. Like 'not being awful to trans people' probably isn't winning the Dems that many swing votes, but the ideological fixation the right has on ruining trans lives seem to be mildly more offputting - and, again, the average voter doesn't really care.
So it's really quite unfortunate how 'sell out on trans issues' is every single professional consultant in America's go-to tip right now.
This is a thing in the UK too, where polling shows that most people are -- not really trans-friendly, but certainly not that interested with the quote-unquote 'trans debate', with quite a lot of people thinking politicians spend too much time on it.
And yet the entire political and journalistic class is absolutely obsessed with being awful to trans people.
i'm the guy who writes the books that the protagonist in supernatural horror movies frantically reads somewhere in act ii. job's pretty easy. lot of "legends of vampires have recurred all throughout human history" and "demonologists agree that the quickest way to un-summon a demon is to trap it in a cursed object". no citations of course; they don't pay me citation money. i had to learn html back in the early aughts when everyone started seeking their supernatural info on websites they found via top search engines like FINDLER and WEBSIGHT but that's died down now which is great because i didn't have it in me to pick up css. currently working on a new book about horses that are evil. it's called HORSES THAT ARE EVIL in all caps so the protagonist can find it quickly to yank off the library shelf. it will be published 35 years ago.
ok like kakapo are great and all, i love them dont get me wrong but takahē are by far the best endangered new zealand bird and quite possibly THE Best Bird?
you cant really get any better than this. criminally underrated
Even better, we thought it was extinct for 50 years, and then we just found a whole bunch in a meadow. We lost a bright purple flightless bird the size of a large chicken for 50 years.
This is not a picture of a Kākāpō. This is a picture of a flightless takahē.
Stop spreading misinformation!
can you read
hip local coffee place is holding a book swap and people are unloading their Neil Gaimans en masse like whole sacks of cursed amulets
aways funny seeing people who genuinely worry about nazis taking over the world hold a book-burning session
yeah man two dozen people trading their old books at a coffee shop is a fucking book burning you're very smart
book burning is when *checks notes* people get rid of stuff they don't want to own anymore
People who get irrationally upset at other people getting rid of books by sex criminals/bigots/some other variety of generally vile person are always fascinating because they always give the strong impression that they wouldn't be nearly as upset if the author in question wasn't a sex criminal/bigot/etc.
Like I can't say with any authority that @theresponseblog would be a-okay with this exact situation if Neil Gaiman wasn't an alleged rapist, if people were just getting rid of those books because they didn't like them, but they sure are giving that vibe.
Story below the cut to avoid a paywall.
Can’t help but think of the @argumate thread that strong borders is inherently xenophobic. It’s not, politely turn away criminals and drug runners at the border. It’s byzantine, arbitrary, cruel, and designed to be maximally financially exploitive. Designed to create that underclass who can’t dream of anything better because it’ll expose them to torture.
right, strong borders don't stop criminals, they create criminals.
